Some days artist Baron Margo drives the three-wheeled rocket car he constructed from a motorcycle engine and airplane parts. On other occasions, he might be tooling around in his custom-shortened, topless gray 1968 Volkswagen coupe. For this metal-machine visionary, it's all in a day's work. For more than 20 years, Margo's palette has been the junk heaps and shipyards he scours for scrap metal and machine parts that are reborn as fantastical found-object sculptures.

The graphic with "Businesses Feel Pressure as Cargo Sits on Water" [Oct. 1] tells a remarkable story about our economy. We send them our waste (paper, scrap metal, pet and animal feeds) and raw materials (cotton, resins and plastics). They do some work on it all (add their labor). They send us back finished goods (furniture, clothes, shoes, toys and electronic equipment). We consume it. A neat little arrangement we have with the rest of the world. Ed Shoop Somis

PAKISTAN A bomb lying in scrap metal brought from neighboring Afghanistan killed eight children near the Pakistani border town of Miranshah, witnesses said. They said the bomb exploded when the children hammered it as they sifted through a pile of scrap metal in Loli Saidgai village, about six miles east of Miranshah. A ninth child was seriously injured in the blast, witnesses said. Villagers said the scrap had been brought from southeastern Afghanistan after bombing there early this year by U.

Re "Old-Car Owners Left in Lurch," Feb. 28: I have a modest proposal. The environmentalists themselves should pony up the money by buying "smog-spewing old clunkers" and turning them into scrap metal, now that Gov. Gray Davis has eliminated that foolish state program. Not likely. Only the government is stupid enough to pay $1,000 for cars worth less than $500. Andrius V. Varnas Redondo Beach

A million tons of radioactive scrap metal may find a new shelf-life in products ranging from soup cans and wristwatches to automobiles and artificial hips. It would be a mammoth recycling project for a legacy of the Nuclear Age. Under a proposal being considered by the Bush administration, the federal government is seeking new uses for lightly contaminated metal as it cleans up its obsolete weapon plants and research labs.

Over the last 30 years, John M. Miller's paintings of angled bars arranged in interlocking rows and columns have been described in many ways--from riveting, bracing and magisterial to busy, dizzying and repetitious. As is always the case with works of art--and particularly urgent with great ones--what is genius to one viewer is boring to another. Either way, no one has had any reason to think of Miller's excruciatingly rigorous paintings as having a sense of humor. Until now.

The owner of eight wrought iron gates discarded two years ago from St. Vibiana's Cathedral moved closer Monday to returning them, but on one condition: They must be used for a new tribute to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Although the cathedral has been sold to a private developer and is scheduled to become a performing arts center and hotel, welder Dan Giles said Monday that he would sell back the gates only if they are used for their original function, part of a monument to the Virgin.

Almost two years ago, welder Dan Giles rescued eight gold-painted gates to a shrine at St. Vibiana's Cathedral from a scrap heap. On Wednesday, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Conservancy and an attorney with a powerful Los Angeles law firm said they want the gates returned. "We are going to ask for the gates," said archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg.

Dan Giles does not call himself a religious man. But he has, he says, respect for God, those who worship, and monuments inspired by faith. All of which leads the 60-year-old welder from Silver Lake to a quandary when he considers the stack of wrought iron gates resting in his yard: He got them as scrap and now figures they'll fetch $50,000. For decades, the eight gold-painted gates, each weighing several hundred pounds, adorned the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe at St.

A fuel leak that led to the fiery crash of an Air France Concorde jet was probably caused by a strip of metal left on the runway where the supersonic jet took off, investigators said Thursday. The 16-inch metal piece probably punctured one of the jet's tires, sending heavy chunks of rubber flying into the jet fuel tanks.